Week 23: Zoo*

I had a look through my own zoo photos - it's been a few years now, but I found a couple that were destined to be painted, or were at least taken for artistic effect - scroll down for my elephant and my flamingo pictures. 
The last illustration I created, I will post first as I stretched myself for this. I discovered this week that twitter's logo is made from 13 circles. I can't remember where I saw this fact, but it inspired me to try some animals of my own. 
Circles in photoshop have driven me crazy in the past but I managed to make one - somewhat by luck and I copied it lots of times to create these four images.
I used a source image for each, as a guide, and arranged my circles as best I could with the constraints - and then re-arranged them until I was either happy or had had enough of tweaking!
Anyway, here they are.

This one had loads of interest on the challenge page, quite overwhelming in fact, and was in the weekly picks :)

Colour pencils on A4
Not cropped from the photo, I really was feeling arty when I took this one, wasn't I?

I spent a lot of time on this one, this must be version 24!
Previous versions had many more colours in the feathers (more realistic, but garish) and many more different flamingoes - they have had all their colour removed and been sent to the back.